CPD MODULE WILL HELP ARCHITECTS AND SPECIFIERS MAKE BETTER PRODUCT CHOICES

The British Board of Agrément (BBA) has received approval from RIBA for the content of its new CPD, titled ‘Navigating 3rd Party Certification: Using BBA Agrément to build with confidence’. The module is designed to help specifiers interpret the information within a BBA Agrément Certificate and have confidence in a product’s suitability for a particular project. 

New responsibilities, resulting from the Building Safety Act, requires the construction industry to help raise the standard on accountability and improve building safety standards, prompting change across the whole sector. Third party certification has a vital role, enabling specifiers to understand if a product is fit for purpose for a specific application.  

Hardy Giesler, BBA CEO, explains, “The Grenfell tragedy has highlighted how vital it is that specifiers are able to make better informed decisions about the products they are choosing. Our research has shown that there is often uncertainty in how certification is interpreted, so following a consultation to understand how we can support the market in this transition, the BBA is rolling out a new CPD designed to help the industry interpret and understand 3rd party certification better, to help them make better decisions.” 

The new CPD will also provide greater clarity on often misunderstood differences between product conformity and certification. 

Julie Bregulla, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) explains, “The BBA’s new CPD is vital to help deliver our goal to support the construction industry, because it is essential that everyone in the value chain understands how to interpret product safety certification correctly. The CPD will enable specifiers to make informed and confident decisions about the products they choose.” 

The BBA’s CPD will be part of RIBA’s core curriculum, from which its members are required to obtain more than half their annual CPD totals. It will be available via monthly online webinars, the first taking place on Wednesday April 17th or can be delivered on a practice by practice basis.  

Helping the construction industry to become fit-for-purpose and future ready

The BBA took part in the Futurebuild event at ExCeL in London, delivering guidance on how companies can gain certification for their building products and management systems, and sharing of our new RIBA® accredited CPD: “Navigating 3rd Party Certification: Using BBA Agrément to build with confidence”.

The Importance of 3rd Party Certification

Throughout the three-day event, the BBA asked visitors to our stand “How does 3rd party certification enable change in the industry?” A live scribe captured responses and created our “living wall” with illustrations and essential information, creating a vibrant and interactive talking-point.

The Futurebuild event is a perfect fit for our mission to help the construction industry become fit-for-purpose and future-ready. A leading exhibition and conference for the built environment, Futurebuild allows visitors to connect with leading suppliers and industry professionals whilst gaining knowledge of sustainable construction across the industry. Visitors were able to discover innovative solutions and services that are helping to transform the built environment, and listen to inspiring ideas from over 300 carefully curated speakers across ten stages.

There were many organisations in attendance with exciting new sustainable products, needing to establish their fitness-for-purpose where current standards don’t exist. We were able to share our experiences of working collaboratively with similar companies, supporting them with the product certification required to build confidence and launch their products successfully.

Demystifying Third Party Certification in the Built Environment Value Chain

The Building Safety Act places new responsibilities on the construction industry to help raise the standard on accountability and improve building safety standards, prompting change across the industry. Third party certification has a vital role, enabling specifiers to understand if a product is fit for purpose for a specific application. The British Board of Agrément (BBA) will launch a new CPD at Futurebuild, titled ‘Navigating 3rd Party Certification: Using BBA Agrément to build with confidence’, which is designed to help specifiers interpret the information within a BBA Agrément Certificate and have confidence in a product’s suitability for a particular project.

Hardy Giesler, BBA CEO, explains, “The Grenfell tragedy has highlighted how vital it is that specifiers are able to make better informed decisions about the products they are choosing. Our research has shown that there is often uncertainty in how certification is interpreted, so following a consultation to understand how we can support the market in this transition, the BBA is rolling out a new CPD designed to help the industry interpret and understand 3rd party certification better, to help them make better decisions.”

The new CPD will also provide greater clarity on often misunderstood differences between product conformity and certification.

Julie Bregulla, Chief Technical Officer (CTO) explains, “The BBA’s new CPD is vital to help deliver our goal to support the construction industry, because it is essential that everyone in the value chain understands how to interpret product safety certification correctly. The CPD will enable specifiers to make informed and confident decisions about the products they choose. By launching at Futurebuild,

we are looking forward to connecting with the industry directly and will be sharing valuable in-person advice on navigating 3rd party certification.”

Learn more at Futurebuild

The BBA is exhibiting at Futurebuild on stand F34, located in the Buildings Zone, and will be delivering guidance on how companies can gain certification for their building products and management systems, and to share detail of their new CPD.

The Importance of 3rd Party Certification

Throughout the three-day event, the BBA will ask, “How does 3rd party certification enable change in the industry?” A live scribe will interact with visitors by capturing responses with illustrations and essential information on the stand wall, to create a vibrant and interactive talking-point. You can also contribute your view by using the button at the end of this article.

Visiting the BBA stand at Futurebuild will be an ideal opportunity to learn more about the benefits of BBA Agrément Certification, and how it can create can assure and communicate key performance features of products and systems. For manufacturers creating a new product, certification can help to establish assess, validate and assure your innovation and create a testing standard where it does not currently exist. The BBA has developed a reputation for quality, high standards and rigorous product assessment, offering peace of mind to specifiers.

Why Futurebuild?

A leading exhibition and conference for the built environment, Futurebuild allows visitors to connect with leading suppliers and industry professionals whilst gaining knowledge of sustainable construction across the industry. Visitors can look forward to discovering innovative solutions and services with its wide range of exhibitors that are helping to transform the built environment, and listen to inspiring ideas with the 2024 programme, which includes over 300 carefully curated speakers across ten stages.

 January 2024

The British Board of Agrément (BBA), the UK’s leading construction products certification body, is pleased to announce the latest manufacturers who have gained BBA accreditation, for products ranging from sustainable timber frame insulation to soil reinforcement Geogrids, and crack sealing systems for highways to anchor bolts.

Recent research by the NBS reveals that almost nine out of ten specifiers consider third party certification to be essential. The world that we face is more complex than ever before, and the built environment continues to navigate its way through demands for a tighter focus on quality and safety. In order to help specifiers make the right choices for their projects, the BBA Agrément Certificate is a recognised and credible scheme for manufacturers of products used in the construction industry to demonstrate a product’s fitness-for-purpose.

The BBA’s detailed assessment of a product or system establishes its performance and offers a mark of excellence based on rigorous national and European standards that validate a construction product’s specialist capabilities.

“The BBA supports a wide range of companies across the construction product supply chain in the UK.  We are particularly pleased to see an increasing number of products with bio content, as well as SMEs having their products certified.  Over a period of almost 60 years, we have championed innovation, helping our clients to bring new ways of working to market in a safe and ‘fit for purpose’ way.  This supports our vision, which is to ensure total peace of mind in the built environments we live, work and play in. Congratulations to all certified.”

Hardy Giesler, CEO, BBA

Recent certification includes:

  • IndiTherm® hemp insulation flexibatts by IndiNature is a flexible thermal insulation ‘batt’ made from UK crops. This sustainable product can save a quarter of a tonne of CO2 per pallet of IndiTherm used in a building project and maintains exceptional thermal and moisture buffering properties.
  • The fermacell® PowerPanel H2O by James Hardie Building Products Ltd is an advanced water-resistant cement bonded board, ideal for walls, floors, and ceilings. Designed for use in damp conditions, the PowerPanel H2O remains stable in buildings such as leisure and sports centres, swimming pools, and catering facilities.
  • Maccaferri’s range of knitted high-tenacity PET GeoGrids finished with a polymeric coating are developed for use as a reinforcement in embankments with slope angles up to 70°. GeoGrids improve soil performance and provide significant benefits to areas with poor bearing capacity as well as seismic zones.
  • Proband 60 by Jobling Purser is a preformed, thermoplastic resin based overbanding system, used to seal and repair cracks, fretted joints and reinstatement joints up to 5mm wide in asphalt and concrete surfaces. The tape helps prevent the ingress of water and with the addition of high PSV aggregate, maintains a high skid resistance.
  • Fischer Fixings has received certifications for multiple anchor bolt products including its zinc-plated and stainless steel Drop-In Anchor EA II and High Performance Anchor FH and FH II-I. The anchors are optimised for fastening different items such as air conditioning units or stadium seating to concrete.
  • For use as a damp-proof and waterproof solution, Solsheet Self Adhesive Membrane by Solco is a high performance cold applied membrane. The product can be used for solid concrete floors, underground structures, reservoir roofs, and for internally and externally applied tanking below ground.

To view all BBA certifications, visit www.bbacerts.co.uk/mybba

“To have BBA certification demonstrates that our products have been tested to the highest standards expected here in the UK, and will undoubtedly assure architects, builders and contractors that our products are not only sustainable but achieve required performance levels.

We are currently the only UK manufacturer of industrial hemp insulation to be accredited with a full BBA Agrément certificate and this is already proving to be very positively received by our current and potential clients.  We are now well placed to offer a range of unique carbon-negative insulation materials with the peace of mind that our products have been tested to the highest standard.

I’d like to thank the team at BBA for their diligence and rigour through the process and we look forward to working with them again as we expand and develop our product range.”

Alex McLeod, CEO, IndiNature

Does the built environment value chain understand the meaning and use of conformity markings and performance certifications?

Government and industry’s response to Brexit and the Grenfell Tower tragedy are inching forward – ushering in big changes to the regime around construction product specification and installation – but a great deal of uncertainty remains.

The current tangle will take time to unravel but there are surely some quick wins available that will provide practical support in difficult times. One obvious example is a concerted push to make sure that everyone in the value chain understands the significance of the range of marks and certifications attached to construction products – and how they should and should not be used.

What is creating all this uncertainty?

There are multiple strands to the changes, adding further complexity and uncertainty. 

Plans to replace the EU’s CE conformity mark with the domestic UKCA mark have – to say the least – not gone smoothly! After several years of back and forth, the switchover for most categories of products is on hold. The deadline for construction products, however, has only been extended to June 2025. The current UKCA process is basically a write-across from the CE regime. Meanwhile, the EU is reviewing the underlying EU Construction Products Regulation (CPR), which will force the UK regulators to decide on their approach; stay aligned to the EU or diverge.  

 At the same time, government is still considering its response to the Independent Review of the Construction Product Testing Regime carried out by ex-Chief Construction Advisor Paul Morrell and KC Anneleise Day in the wake of the Grenfell Tragedy.  

Morrell and Day argue that because the CPR’s underlying purpose is to create a level playing field for trade, there isn’t actually a specific “UK system for testing the safety of construction products”: Instead, we have “a system for assessing conformity to whatever performance requirements are set down in the standards”. They are also concerned that under the CPR, as pasted into UK law, only products that fall under a UK Designated Standard (currently identical to the relevant EU Harmonised Standard) are subject to regulation – leaving, according to some sources, as many as two thirds of products on the market unregulated. In response, they have suggested that one option would be to bring all products under regulation via a general safety requirement and/or creating new designated standards alongside a list of safety critical products to be set out in further regulations by the Secretary of State. 

The wider response to the Grenfell tragedy is also gathering pace with the rolling implementation of the Building Safety Act. The Act places new responsibilities on all duty holders in relation to all buildings, including designers and contractors as part of a drive to raise the bar on accountability and skills. Additionally, the new Building Safety Regulator (BSR) will oversee a new regime for higher risk buildings that includes new approval and change control procedures. The BSR will work with the existing Office for Product Safety and Standards, which has recently expanded its remit to include construction products. The regulations that will underpin this role are still to be published but its Deputy Director recently advised that “we are out there regulating products now, ahead of a future regime”  with a focus on priority products including fire doors, smoke dampers, plywood, electrical cables and insulation.   

Back to basics?

Faced with this complicated picture, it isn’t surprising that when we spoke with several trade associations representing different parts of the value chain, they were sometimes struggling to give clear advice to their member companies. It is also true that much of the confusion will only be fully resolved by pending decisions from Ministers, publication of new secondary regulations and the bedding in of the new Regulators.

The sector can, however, start acting now to take heed of the words of the Chair of the Health & Safety Executive, Sarah Newton, who has called on industry to take “ownership and responsibility for delivering a safe system through the life cycle of a building” and urged that greater “collaboration and collective responsibility are key to delivering better standards”.

A fundamental step on this culture change journey is surely to ensure that clients, specifiers, contractors and anyone else with an influence over the materials and systems that end up in our buildings fully understand the meaning of product markings and certifications, and how they relate to their responsibilities.

Taking two important examples. Firstly, as we’ve already seen, the UKCA/CE marking is mandatory where a product falls under the scope of a UK designated standard/EU harmonised standard – and functions as a declaration from the manufacturer that the product complies with the law for placing it on the market and applicable conformity assessment procedures. UKCA/CE can also be affixed if a product is covered by a United Kingdom Assessment Document (UKAD). They are not, however, currently mandatory for all construction products, and neither are they a universally valid quality indicator. Importantly, they also explicitly do not deal with compliance with building regulations or duty holders’ obligations. Furthermore, manufacturers need to declare a level of performance against a set of essential characteristics (or report No Performance Determined if a characteristic is judged irrelevant to the intended function of the product). This means that anyone substituting a specified product cannot assume that an alternative carrying a UKCA/CE marking will offer equivalent performance.

Second, a BBA Agrément Certificate needs to be understood as the output from an assessment process that establishes a quantifiable measure of performance for a specific product or system. The assessment is grounded in national and European standards but unlike CE/UKCA marking it does provide independent third-party assurance of the product’s formulation and performance claim. Agrément certificates are in effect expressions of the BBA’s expert assessment of its fitness for purpose in respect of its intended use. This means they provide information to potential specifiers to assess if a product is suitable for a particular installation. They can’t and shouldn’t be used as a universal guarantee of a product’s safety or compliance with building regulations in all circumstances, nor do they remove the need for suitably qualified and experienced professionals to make judgements on their application on a case-by-case basis.

On the evidence of our conversations with industry players, we aren’t convinced these basic principles are widely understood across the Built Environment. This is a barrier to all players fully grasping their legal responsibilities – and ultimately to a world in which highly competent professionals are using good quality, reliable product information to make the judgements needed to create better, safer and greener buildings.

Find out more about BBA Agrément Certificates here.

Do you agree? We’d love to know what you think. Email us: hello@bbacerts.co.uk.

AUTHOR PROFILE:

Andrew Crudgington is an independent researcher and writer who works across the built environment. Previously he was Director of Policy at the Institution of Civil Engineers.

Taking advantage of its experience of certifying couplers under its Agrément Certification scheme, the British Board of Agrément has now enhanced its UKAS Accredited Rebar Scheme.

The combination of concrete and steel rebar provides the optimum product to reduce the risk of fractures, movement and forces that might cause damage to a structure. Using product which has been certified by an independent third party, such as the BBA, during production and fabrication, helps ensure product consistency and compliance to relevant standards.

Couplers are widely used within Construction and Infrastructure projects to connect two rebars together in reinforced concrete structures. They offer many benefits, being easy to install and inspect and helping maintain the quality of the concrete. Adding couplers to its Reinforcing Steel Scheme.

We have extensive experience of assessing couplers as part of Agrément Certificates, so it makes sense to include the use of mechanical couplers for the jointing of rebar to enhance our Reinforcing Steel Scheme offer. 

Jason Harries, Product Lead, BBA

Covering production at steel mills, cold rolling and processing, the BBA scheme assures the supply chain of a high quality, consistent product, verified by a third-party auditing process control. Traceability of product covered by the Reinforced Steel Scheme is achieved by the use of the BBA’s unique Rolling Mark.